Inside the POC!!!!

Wish you were here!

We're flying inside of a weather system called a "pocket of open cells" (POC), which you can see in the photograph. We're flying on the NSF C-130 aircraft. This weather system is huge, about 100 km across and about 1000 km long (so about the same area as the Island of Cuba to the south of the United States). The interesting aspect about this feature is that the processes occurring within the POC are controlled by drizzle. Drizzle is light precipitation that mostly contains very small rain drops that are barely detectable with the human eye when they fall on you. However, even though this precipitation is very light, it can wash out many of the tiny (100 times smaller than human hair) aerosol particles in the atmosphere. Scientists think that this cleansing of the air in the POC helps to sustain this type of weather system. In this way, what we see from space as a huge change in the clouds may be strongly influenced by the tiniest of particles.

You might also be interested in:

The Southeast Pacific region typically has extensive stratocumulus cloud cover over the ocean. These offshore clouds can contain clear areas in the clouds that scientists call "pockets of open cells,"...more

Drizzle is light precipitation that is made up of liquid water drops that are smaller than rain drops. Drizzle can be so light that only a millimeter of accumulation is measured at the Earth's surface....more

Rain is precipitation that falls to the Earth in drops of 5mm or greater in diameter according to the US National Weather Service. Virga is rain that evaporates before reaching the ground. Raindrops form...more

Aerosols, also called particulates, are tiny bits of solid or liquid suspended in the air. Some aerosols are so small that they are made only of a few molecules – so small that they are invisible because...more

Many students in atmospheric science were motivated to enter the field by some fascinating extreme weather event experienced as a child. This was not the case with me. When I was an undergraduate I was...more

I'm a physical oceanographer interested in climate variability and especially the El Niño phenomenon. Other than the annual cyle of the seasons, El Niño is the largest pulsation of the climate. I'm interested...more

Hola! I am originally from the Netherlands and thereafter spent 3 years as a child in the Peruvian Andes, but I have lived most of my life in the United States. I received my bachelor's degree in physics...more